Briefly Noted

Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (Penguin Press). “I am wired in a different way than this event requires,” Barack Obama said, according to the authors, as he prepared for his second debate with Mitt Romney and tried to redeem his disastrous performance in their first round. “I just don’t know if I can do this.” The book goes some way toward explaining how he did win in 2012, at least as viewed from certain strata in both campaigns: top aides, establishment brokers, and bundlers. It’s replete with insider dialogue, in and out of quotation marks, and newsy tidbits. Ideology is relatively uncharted, as is the rise of the Tea Party. By the end, Romney’s flaws as a candidate are clear, but there is only a glimpse of the campaign’s place in his party’s wars.

SERVANTS, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton). This belowstairs history opens at the close of the nineteenth century, when the system began to break down. As modernity arrives—with a rising middle class, a dwindling aristocracy, electrical appliances, world war, and women’s suffrage—some cling to the elaborate old order with a passion bordering on perversity. Servants, the one indispensable status symbol, continue to be “kept” by all respectable households, even those which can ill afford them. Within half a century, attitudes have shifted so drastically that service, once considered dignified, is seen as demeaning. Drawing on primary sources, many written by servants, Lethbridge captures the revolution with both sweep and intimacy, and never loses sight of the workers at its heart.

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa). The second novel in the author’s Neapolitan series is a story about ambition and the complexities of friendship. In Naples in the nineteen-sixties, the narrator, Elena, and her wild, brilliant friend Lila are two working-class young women. While Elena spends her days reading books, hoping to further her schooling, the newly married Lila has renounced study for a life of financial security. Despite shared affection, each comes to envy the other’s perceived freedom and bravery. The book is artfully written and absorbing, and its narrative explores varying routes to happiness, loneliness as the price of independence, and the ultimate power of education. “Words,” Elena thinks, “with them you can do and undo as you please.”

3 SECTIONS, by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf). “My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately,” the author writes, imagining himself as a primitive being ill-adapted to glass-strewn streets and swank soirées. Short poems here often confront contemporary dilemmas with caustic humor. The collection culminates in two extended pieces. A prose memoir recalls time spent as a young man among North Pacific salmon fishermen. And a remarkable poem, “Personal Essay,” confronts a creative crisis in which things, emptied of “pathetic, clinging analogies,” symbolize, allegorize, and “embody nothing but themselves.” Seshadri urgently explores “how shocking the obvious can be / if you’re not ready for it.”